The present study examined whether directional asymmetry in translation priming was found for different-script languages and investigated whether translation ambiguity in the L1 prime or target affected the magnitude of priming. Unbalanced Korean-English bilinguals participated in two masked translation priming tasks with translation-ambiguous and translation-unambiguous word pairs. Results revealed a directional asymmetry in translation priming consistent with previous research. Significant translation priming was obtained in both L1-L2 and L2-L1 directions, with stronger priming effects in the L1-L2 direction. Word pairs with translation-ambiguous primes resulted in weaker translation priming effects compared to translation-unambiguous prime-target pairs in the L1-L2 direction. However, no effects of translation ambiguity on the magnitude of priming were observed when the locus of the ambiguity was in the target for the same word pairs in the L2-L1 direction. These results confirm and extend previous findings on bilingual word recognition suggesting that L1 typically has more impact on L2 lexical processing than vice versa and show that divergence in meaning across a bilingual's two languages causes processing difficulty. Implications for models of bilingual lexical retrieval are also discussed.
Cognitive scientists Spelke and Kintzler (2007) and Carey (2009) identify objects, actions, space and numbers as "core domains of knowledge" that are essential for conceptualizing the world. Gardenfors (2019, 2020) argues that objects, actions and space are characterized by invariances in sensory signals. In this paper, we extend the analysis of invariances to the domain of numbers (understood as positive integers). As a theoretical background, we assume that numbers, as studied in cognitive science, are properties of collections. We claim that the domain of numbers is determined by two types of invariances: (i) the invariance under the location of its objects; (ii) the unconstrained fungibility of objects, which is the determinant invariance of the number concept: If an object in a collection is exchanged for another object, the collection will still contain the same number of objects. We show that invariance under fungibility closely maps onto one-to-one correspondences between collections. Our theoretical analysis is supported by empirical material.
This study investigates vowel-based sound symbolism in Korean ideophones, focusing on how contrasts between yang and yin vowels-associated with perceived size, valence, and intensity- influence lexical processing. Experiment 1, a questionnaire study, confirmed that ideophones containing yin vowels were interpreted as conveying greater negativity, intensity, and size than those with yang vowels. Experiment 2 employed a lexical decision task to examine whether such sound-symbolic associations influence realtime language processing. The results were mixed: accuracy data indicated a mismatch effect, with lower accuracy for yang-vowel ideophones following large-object primes, but no clear facilitation under congruent conditions. Additionally, reaction times for yang-vowel ideophones were slower overall, regardless of prime type. These findings suggest that while explicit sound-symbolic associations are robust, their effects on online lexical processing are context-dependent. Notably, faster responses to yin-vowel ideophones align with prior evidence that conceptually larger objects are processed more efficiently, highlighting the interaction between phonological iconicity and semantic salience in language comprehension.
This survey article reviews the global reception of the Cognitive Revolution and traces the development of cognitive science in East Asia and the Pacific from the 1980s to the present. It focuses on domestic initiatives and international conferences-most notably the ICCS series (from 1997), the founding of the Journal of Cognitive Science (from 2000), and the establishment of the International Association for Cognitive Science (IACS) in 2008- culminating in ICCS Tokyo 2025, after which the conference becomes annual. We survey how cognitive science theories developed. We pay attention to the institutional conditions that enabled sustained intellectual exchange. Focusing on Japan-Korea cooperation in formal linguistics and semantics, the article highlights two successful conference traditions-the Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC) and the Japanese/Korean (J/K) Linguistics Conference, as well as LENLS (Logic and Engineering in Natural Language Semantics)-as positive models of archival continuity. The discussion contrasts these cases with more fragmented developments elsewhere in East Asia and argues that long-term success in cognitive science depends not only on theoretical innovation but also on durable archival infrastructures and quality international journals, often maintained through individual scholarly responsibility.
This study investigated the neural correlates of morphological processing in Sino-Korean prefixed derivations in the visual word recognition. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), brain responses to morphological, semantic and orthographic priming effects were examined on the three time windows: N250 (200-270 ms), N400 (340-380 ms), and a late positivity component (LPC) (380-450 ms). Forty-three native Korean speakers participated in a masked priming lexical decision task while their EEG was recorded. The overall results revealed robust and sustained neural effects of N250, N400 and a late positivity for morphological priming, but absence or very weak effects for semantic and orthographic priming, indicating early morphological decomposition and subsequent reanalysis. The following topographic analysis further confirmed that the morphological priming effects were elicited at language related brain regions. These findings were taken as supporting evidence for the early sub-lexical and continuous engagement of morphological analysis of the lexicon in visual word recognition, extending our understanding of morphological decomposition beyond alphabetic languages.
